Nepal held an internationally supervised election for its new 601-member Constituent Assembly (CA) on April 10, 2008, with the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) emerging as the largest single party, securing 220 seats. Of 54 parties that contested the election, 25 secured enough votes to be represented in the CA. At its first meeting, on May 28, the CA dissolved the 240-year-old monarchy. On July 21 the CA elected Ram Baran Yadav the first president of Nepal. Pushpa Kamal Dahal—popularly known as Prachanda—of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) was elected prime minister.

In other news, Tibetan refugees in Nepal staged multiple anti-Chinese demonstrations that provoked sharp responses from China. Prachanda, meanwhile, attended the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games in Beijing on August 24. He paid official visits to India and to the United Nations in September. Violence in Nepal’s southern region and disputes over the integration of Maoist combatants into the national army prompted a visit by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on October 31.

In early December the United Nations announced at a news conference in Kathmandu that Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal had agreed to a date whereby nearly 3,000 Maoist child soldiers would be released from military camps. In coordination with the UN, the combatants would be discharged at the end of February 2009.

A breach in the Kosi River barrage in August displaced nearly 100,000 people in eastern Nepal (and more than 2,000,000 people in adjacent Bihar state, India). The heavy rainfall in western Nepal also affected some 160,000 people. On October 8 a small aircraft crashed in Lukla, killing 18 passengers.

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Meanwhile, more than 100,000 Bhutanese, who had been forced to leave the country in the early 1990s when strict citizenship rules were enforced, were living in refugee camps in Nepal and were barred from voting. According to the International Organization for Migration, more than 3,000 refugees had been resettled in the U.S., New Zealand, Denmark, Australia, and The Netherlands.